brotherofJared

A perfect plan does have the resemblance of being the only way it could be done. But God's plan is not like gravity. Gravity is a law that will always respond in the same way every time. God's plan didn't always exist. Gravity did. The plan from getting from point A, a state of intelligence, to point B, a state of neverending life has a lot of obstacles in the way. God knew what the objective was, but getting there without cheating (as some of our critics seem to be okay with) takes considerable planning. For example, I find it fascinating that the best way to preserve the Biblical witness through time was to keep it out of the hands of men and that's exactly what God did with the Book of Mormon. It laid dormant, untouched by man, buried by a prophet, uncovered by a prophet. If the world accepted it as authentic, it would be the most valuable source material of any ancient records that we have. That's just one piece of a perfect plan and it was God that set it to preserve his work, not just something that had to be done. Of course, it had to be done, but that doesn't make it any less God's plan.

It could be the same event. While the priesthood or authority to administer the gospel was taken from the earth, God's work was not destroyed. This is a scenario where Satan gloats over his accomplishments only to find that God's work continues and there really is nothing Satan can do to stop it.

Fairmormon has a pretty good section on this question. I'm with you. I believe he was married. I don't believe he had any children, but I do believe he was married.

I personally don't think there's much we can do without a leader. We would need a Moroni to rally behind, otherwise; everything we'd be doing would be ineffectual. However, I don't think saving the constitution is something that we will consciously do. I'm not even certain that we'd know how the constitution was saved without some hindsight. Like, who are these elders who will save it? I envision that situation to be like the 7000 who would not bend the knee to Baal when the prophet lamented his isolation. They are there. They don't know who they are. There will be a lot of talkers, a lot of people quoting scripture out of ignorance, but these few people will simply be in the right place at the right time and will do the right thing. If the world knew who they were, the world could stop them. That's the way I see it. The only thing we can do is rely on the promises of God that if we would obey his commandments, this nation would prosper. That's our job. We have to leave the rest of it to the Lord.

The issue, IMO, is that their body before the fall could die. That is not the state of being the Father's body is in. A resurrected being cannot die and in order to be a resurrected being, a person has to die. To become like our Father in Heaven, we need to be resurrected beings.

Easy. Their mothers were African or Hispanic or white.

I realize that. I don't think it means that we will be having sex to make spirit babies. I've already explained why.

The reason I said it wasn't relative is because it has nothing to do with how many children you expect one person to produce regardless of whether it is an eternity or 80 years.

I can see this discussion will not go anywhere. No matter how hard I try, the majority here will only see what they want to see and would rather talk about what they believe is my problem than the actual question that I asked. I understand that there are some who think speculation is bad. I disagree. But I have to wonder why they think they need to be the thought police and jump in on a discussion that they don't like. We all speculate. If we didn't, we'd never discover new truths. I believe it's part of studying it out in our minds. So, I'll leave this discussion actually being more certain than I ever was before, which often happens when one meets so much resistance to an idea. These are my conclusions. When exalted resurrected beings have children, they are physical beings. They do not have spirit babies, they have real babies. I've said this before in innuendo toward this end, but we already know how to have children. I don't believe it will be any different there than it is here and I don't believe we'll have billions of them. And male and a female can produce a whole world of offspring and that's where the 100s of billions of souls will come into life. I said it in another post in this thread, but I'm certain that intelligences will come to a Christ-like intellect who will bring them to us as a group seeking to become even as we are. As we learn of them and learn who they are, a process that I think is not unlike God when he found himself in the midst of glory and intelligence, we will organize them into families with a head like Adam and a Savior, like Christ and we will follow the same plan that God set for us. By organizing these spirits into families, we become their heavenly parents. There are obviously some details missing. The first thing that clued me in an there being a problem was a statement made by a presenter at a blacks in the priesthood fireside. The speaker was black. He said, I'm not black because God cursed me. I'm black because my mother was black. I puzzled over that for years. It makes sense, but it doesn't fit the Bible narrative. If what he said was true, what color was my mother? Since the obvious answer is white. It seems apparent that we came from different mothers (I understood his statement to mean that black people originated for a black mother, not from a curse. I tend to agree with that). So where did this other mother come from and why aren't we told about her? So that presented a puzzle about Adam and Eve and their story. When I was young, I believed they were made from clay and that God animated them by putting breath or their spirit into the clay. But since that time, I came to realize, mostly from temple experiences that Adam and Ever were not alone in the garden. They were not surprised by the appearance of Lucifer so it seems that other people or beings were not an unusual thing to see. I began to see the narrative in Genesis to be symbolic of birth and marriage. It is not uncommon to find the rib from Adam being mentioned in marriage ceremonies and used frequently to remind couples that the man is not a tyrant leader in the home but a co-partner with is wife. Who were Adam and Eve's actual physical parents then? Connecting that with a continuation of the seeds, then I can see that through the same process of having children the way we do it now is most likely the same as it will happen in heaven amongst legally married gods. This creates the potential of peopling many earths and giving home to trillions of beings without the gods making their god wife produce them all. We just do it the same way it has always been done. We don't have to invent anything new. Further, with such a community, it's entirely likely that Eve's parents were not the same as Adam's parents. Then there was the question of how could Christ be the firstborn and not be the head of the human family? How did Adam get that slot and somehow find Jesus in the middle of the human family? There is obviously to two family relationships. One where are the children of our existing families and one where we are the children of God. That same relationship could have existed in heaven in the preexistence as well. In one relationship we are directly the children of God. In the other relationship, we are the children of Adam and by extension, the children of God (that extension is too vast to contemplate, but it's should be easily understood). Then there was the big problem of a savior. If we were to make our own planet and put our own children on it, who in all our offspring could ever say that they can only do what they saw their father do? Since that is what Jesus said and I take it literally, that he actually saw his Father do the things he did and was about to do. Joseph Smith stated that he could not tell the Father from the Son until one spoke to introduce the other. But we all know that he should have been able to tell the difference. Wouldn't Jesus have scars on his hands and his feet? Joseph didn't say it about the vision, but he did alude to it in the KFD. It appears that His Father, in the first vision also had the same scars. Which one of us will ever be able to do that? None of us. I don't believe Christ's atonement atoned for worlds yet uncreated. I believe every world, as it seems that at least one other world did, goes through the same evolution that our world did and that they each will have a Savior. We can't be the example of what a Savior must do. Only one being can be that person and lucky for us, we'll be sharing that throne with Him. Those were the issues. They were the dots. This is the way I connected them. You all might have a different way of connecting them, but this is how I did it. Thanks

I believe I stated why and I was not disseminating any such ideas. I brokered this thread in the form of a question. Expecting to get valid Christ like answers and discussion in return. Instead, It seems that I am talking to group of Methodist ministers who can't handle anything outside of their status quo. Don't question our beliefs even if they aren't doctrine. Your very close to apostasy, if you don't get in line, you'll be preaching your nonsense from hell. Yea. Right.

Nowhere. I never said that any prophet past or present ever said any such thing nor am I arguing that that is what we must do to be like him. In fact, I'm arguing the opposite. I'm arguing the prevailing belief is that we will be just like him and do everything that he did. That is what many members of the church think. They believe that to be gods we must be God. But our scriptures teach us that simply being all-knowing and all-powerful does not make God, God. Our scriptures tell us exactly what will make us gods. And from those scriptures, which I have posted in this thread, I have offered my "substantiated" opinion and did so in the form of a question to invite discussion, not lectures based on an opinion about me that is unsubstantiated.

No. I disagree with you. It is very relevant and I haven't found a single woman who is willing to be a baby factory. There may be some, of course, there will be some but a few who are willing doesn't make it any more relevant. Well, I don't see how that is going to become any less counterintuitive. I don't know what kind of person you think I am or what way you think I live but I think such statements about people who want to connect the dots have every right to. I'm tired of sitting in Sunday School classes where someone will say, we'll be the gods of our own planets and put our spirit children there. Everyone in the room nods their head like bobblehead figurines and no one blinks an eye. If that's the kind of mortal life you want to live, then I'm okay with that. It's not the kind of life I want to live and I believe there are a lot of youth who won't buy into such inane ideas. That's not what's going to happen. They know it and, at least, I know it. One day you'll get asked the question and just like the ignorant protestants and Catholics, you'll have to say, don't question your faith. Just believe and we'll all know after we die (of course, then it's too late to do anything about it).

Agreed. What has this got to do with the topic? And, what scripture are you quoting that principle from? I'm not sure what you mean by agency. I don't know what other "new estates" you think we might advance to. IMO, the only thing that damns us is being single and choosing not to follow Christ. I believe that so long as this earth stands and has mortals on it, we will have the opportunity to do both. Once this earth has been celestialized, those options will be off the table. They do. I don't believe they use sex to produce spirits anymore than mortals do. Because the reckoning of time varies, it is irrelevant to this discussion. Except if you think that we can travel back in time. I believe that time is always moving forward. There is no such thing as time travel, except in our minds and in that state, it is only wishful thinking. But time is irrelevant to producing children. I don't care how much time one might give a person, no one wants to give birth to 100s of billions of babies. We love them yes, but there is a much better way to make a family and God has shown us how. Then I guess we shouldn't teach anything about either. Sadly, I guess... We do and I don't think it so far beyond us that we won't be able to grasp the idea of having children. We are very practiced at doing it. Having children is not a mystery.

I don't think I ever produced such logic. If I gave that impression, it's not what I meant. Sex between husband and wife will continue, IMO, just as it does here and for the same purpose. That will continue throughout eternity. That is continuing the seeds. My point is that is not the way spirit children are formed. I hope this is cleared up now. I see no logic in that either. I'm not sure what point you are driving at. The concept of family will always exist had has always existed. That does not change the fact that we are co-eternal with God. Because we are all co-eternal with God, I do believe that at one point in time, we were without family. Family was vital to our progress, but the concept has always existed. The idea that I'm trying discuss is how that relationship, being co-eternal, affects the development of family. I assume that the only point where we forgot our previous estate was at mortal birth. I don't believe we go through cycles where we forget everything we ever knew and start over again repeatedly. Do spirit children forget their preexistence as intelligences? I don't think so. I don't think there are any spirit babies. They aren't raised to maturity. They aren't born in the same way as mortal children are born. "Arranged there rather than here" is, in my mind, the same as saying they were "pre-arranged". In essence, I understand the spiritual birth in the preexistence to be a covenant and not a literal birth in the same sense as mortal birth. Since I see it as a covenant it makes sense to me that we chose to be children of God, but our lineage, the order in which we were born into mortality, was "organized", IMO. For example. I believe, Satan is also a spirit and that makes him a child of God, but he has no familial, nor do I believe he was ever supposed to be someone's mortal son and chose to abort or leave that family. So, I guess I'm reconciling two threads here. One is as a son of God, which you have stated is by covenant. This is not a being who is born of a father and mother. And then we have the family that we are associated with in mortality who we look like and are similar characteristics. This is the same duality of family we have in mortality. We are born, naturally of our mortal parents and we are born by covenant, a son of God whose mother not seen and there is no literal birth. I believe this same duality continues throughout eternity and that spirits are formed in much the same way (this would seem to indicate spirit babies, but I believe the organization of family is simply by appointment, not birth. This is obviously a gray area even for me, and I'm willing to be wrong, but the point of this discussion is that God, the Father's wife did not give birth to our spirits). You may not believe this or you may not accept it, but I believe this aligns with what I've been saying. I see this from the opposite perspective. Our light and intelligence was given spirit form that could not have come by any other means except through covenants with God. I believe we were already developed when we made that covenant. I believe our identity, the essence of our being is in our intelligence, the amount of light and truth we were willing to accept or emanate and our spirit was just the embodiment of that intelligence, just as I believe that our physical bodies is simply the embodiment of that same intelligence or light and truth. I hope this makes some sense. The issue I have is that it does impact our salvation; or the expectation of our salvation.There are a lot of people that accept things as they come and are willing to dwell in the uncertainty of what will come. They have a come-what-may kind of attitude. Any discussion of what may be will be meaningless to these people. I'm not that way. I have expectations and when that expectation is not met I am disappointed and often feel cheated. I don't buy into this idea that whatever will be will be far better than anything I could have ever imagined. Not so. That's for born-again Christians who have no clue what the next life will be. Of course, anything besides singing in a choir for eternity would be an improvement so maybe if my expectations were low, I could be impressed, but our expectations in this church are not low. In my apologetics, I frequently face ridicule for the childish view that our church as that we will be Gods. And don't get me wrong, I believe we will be, but the idea that we will ever do what God did (it baffles me that the present and future tense would be in question here, but anyway) simply cannot be. So, first expectation shot down. We're not going to do everything that God did. Never will happen in an eternity. We not going to make planets and put our own spirit children on them and be like God the Father over those planets. That is never going to happen, noting any eternity. There's another expectation shot down. The disappointment is rising. Our doctrine teaches simply this, that we will be gods because we will continue to increase and this increase comes solely through continuing the seeds, not in knowledge or power, but in children. I think it is very important to know and understand how that works and in what it will mean to us and for them. Will we create worlds without end? Probably. Will we put our own children on them? I hope not. I mean, consider this. I'm white. My wife is asian. If only my children are on that planet, then there would be no children of any other color on it. It would be a planet full of incest. My Adam and Eve would be brother and sister. That's gross regardless of the excuses we give to that possibility for our first parents, but I don't believe they were brother and sister. I believe they were born of completely different sets of parents who were not God the Father and his wife. I also don't believe that God made them out of dirt, just in case anyone here doesn't get it that I didn't buy into that scheme either. I believe life goes on there, just as it goes on here with the same kind of sociality. I certainly hope it does. I believe that we will always work as a society, as a council under Jesus Christ. There is no running off into the universe to do our own thing and build our own worlds. I'm not disappointed with that. I find it acceptable and doable. What I look forward to is finding myself in the midst of spirits and glory and seeing fit to institute laws whereby they might advance and become like me. That is what God did that we can do. That is the essence of godhood.

I agree with that. And the nonsense being taught in the church today is that we will make our own planets and put our own spirit children on them. That speculation is not correct and it is damaging, IMO.